As illustrated in FIG. 17 of the accompanying drawings, tires T have such an internal structure in which while a bead core Bc composed of a bundle of metal wires formed in the shape of a ring is arranged in a bead portion 100 at each of the tire's left and right sides, a bead filler Bf of a hard rubber is arranged about the outer periphery of the bead core, and respective ends of a carcass 101 are turned up to enrobe the bead core Bc and the bead filler Bf. In building such tires, a number of bead part assemblies B like the one shown in FIG. 18 is provided by preparatively assembling together the bead core Bc and the bead filler Bf yet to be vulcanized and the bead part assemblies B are then supplied one by one to a tire building machine in order to provide unvulcanized tires (green tires).
Then, bead fillers yet to be vulcanized are sticky, so that if a number of bead part assemblies is collected in a stacked state, they tend to undergo adhesion to one another, when problems are encountered such that the bead part assemblies have to be isolated from one another, this taking time and labor, and that bead fillers are permit ted to undergo deformation and a quality lowering. Thus, if an attempt is made to s tore bead part assemblies in a mutually isolated condition in order to avoid the above problems, another problem is met that not only it takes time and labor to fulfil the necessary operation therefor but is it also required to secure a relatively large space for the storage of bead part assemblies.
Therefore, recently there was a proposition made to place bead part assemblies individually separately on a spacer and store them in tiers, horizontally set by set of a bead part assembly and a spacer. In this way, it is made possible to store a number of bead part assemblies at a location in a relatively limited space. However, the operation for separating spacers out of the stock of bead part assemblies stacked with the spacers interposed between them, taking out the bead part assemblies and feeding them one by one to the tire building machine, has to rely on a manual handling, so that a neck is involved for attaining an enhancement of the tire building efficiency.
A primary object of the present invention is to provide a method of and apparatus for transferring and setting bead part assemblies for or of tires which can be relied on in highly efficiently supplying bead part assemblies stacked in tiers through separators to a tire building machine and enhancing the tire production efficiency.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a method of and apparatus for transferring and setting bead part assemblies for tires by which emptied separators can be efficiently collected.